Whodunit Column by Bruce Tierney

Since the early 1990s, T. Jefferson Parker has been lauded as the go-to guy for contemporary California noir, thanks to such genre classics as Laguna Heat, Silent Joe and Little Saigon. In recent years, he has crafted a supernatural, suspense-laden series featuring Charlie Hood, a Los Angeles County sheriff on loan to the ATF, who works along the U.S.-Mexican border to try to stem the flow of...